There have been a fair number of papers published on Google technologies. At conferences, most people I've met have read the paper on which Google was founded, but the ones on GFS and MapReduce are lesser known. If you're interested, most Google research papers are posted here.

We've made a small change to the patches page in response to your feedback. There's now a page of sample videos, and the full patched source tarball of VLC that we build Google Video's player from. We've also put the Google Search Appliance distribution and kernel mirror online, so as to best comply with the GPL. You can find links to all of these on the patches page.

In what we think is an insanely cool development, we've gotten word that VLC has taken that patch and is integrating elements of it into VLC. You can see the changeset on their site. Thanks to the VLC team, you folks rock.

A lot of people have expressed interest in adding data to Google Earth, so we're happy to now have documentation and a tutorial about the KML file format it uses. The folks on the Keyhole BBS have done some amazing work and we wanted to help them continue to invent.